Two Mid-Nineteenth Century Innovations: The Judeo-Spanish Press, Photography

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards the Sephardi communities of the Balkans opened up to Westernisation and modernisation. With the establishment in the mid-nineteenth century of the Judeo-Spanish press, producing dozens of periodicals in the Sephardi printing houses of Izmir, Salonica and Istanbul together and the introduction of modern educational institutions such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, written literary production flourished. Thanks to modern European influences the new ‘adopted’ genres, the novel, theatre and lyric song, which featured on their pages revealed and portrayed Jewish communal life as it underwent enormous changes and advances.
During this same period the invention of photography, together with a seemingly insatiable interest in the exotic if ‘backward’ countries of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, attracted photographers to record for posterity daily life in the Sephardi communities. Jewish journalistic output described a changing way of life: the slow but gradual emancipation of women, the introduction of new Westernised fashions and new entertainments such as the cinema. All these changing mores featured in the Ladino literature, plays and novels, that were so popular in the Jewish press as well as the social and political debate that ensued.
The images produced by photographers provide a visual record that complements the written one. They vividly depict the natural catastrophes, fires and earthquakes that so frequently occurred and the trades, costumes and habitats of the mainly impoverished Jews living in the Fez mellah as in the photographs taken by Elias Burton Holmes in the late-nineteenth century and Auguste Léon’s luminous autochrome photographs of Salonica (1913). These images evoke the descriptions, both direct and indirect, present in Ladino literature and provide an invaluable tool to enhance our understanding of changing Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans and Morocco. In this presentation, I will study the intertwined links between the Judeo-Spanish press and photography.